Animation Specialisation: Character Desgin

Or ‘Kate wastes a whole week and a half drawing pretty clothes and colour variations instead of doing actual work’

In this post you get to see how overboard I go when I’m having fun with what I’m doing. In coming up with a character for my bear chase animation, I wanted to go with a fantasy esque character (you have no idea how close I am to giving her elf ears) in brighter, but still more natural colours.

So! We start with the basic ideas I came up with after doing a hell of a lot of trawling on pinterest for ideas. I came up with five ideas (I could have done more but I had to stop somewhere!) and started working on some basic contrast shading. (As you can see: very basic)

I mashed together a bunch of palettes to come up with a group of mostly matching colours that I could use for my character that would also match and blend nicely with the colours I’m planning to use on the backgrounds, that will make everything look like it’s part of the same world and not like a bunch of blatantly seperate layers.

This part probably wasn’t strictly necessary but I really enjoyed playing around with the different palettes and matching them to the outfits.

I also played around with some basic hairstyles and skintones.

And a really bad ‘cleaned up’ version of the final character. I like the outfit and the colours used, but I’m planning on changing the hair, and obviously, fixing up the actual drawings themselves.